At
first glance, you might think U.S. Senators Gordon Smith and Ron
Wyden of Oregon work together about as well as a plaid shirt and
a striped tie.

Smith wears a gorgeous wedding band with huge diamond
studs, keeps his thick head of hair perfectly landscaped, and dons
exquisitely tailored suits. He has the bearing of a corporate board
member, speaking slowly and deliberately. During his first campaign
for Senate, newspapers referred to him as a 'tycoon.'
He owns and rides horses and posts photos of his picture-perfect
family on his Senate website.

Wyden wears comfortable leather loafers and sports
a somewhat wispy coiffure. He’s tall and lanky and attended the
University of California at Santa Barbara 30 years ago on a basketball
scholarship. Wyden’s words convey the earnestness of a close family
friend, and when conversation turns to an issue dear to him, he
speaks plaintively, like a Sierra Club doorknocker on the cusp of
a big donation. On his website, he posts a simple black-and-white
head shot next to his bio.

Like their outward appearances, the Oregon pair’s
politics and backgrounds are night-and-day different. A Jewish Democrat
with natural constituencies in the left-leaning cities of Eugene
and Portland, Wyden has built his political career around protecting
the environment, safeguarding government programs for seniors, and
most recently, by staking out expertise in technology. Before he
was a senator, he represented Oregon for 15 years in the House of
Representatives. Before that, he pressed Medicare claims with the
Gray Panthers, an Oregon senior citizens’ advocacy group. Wyden
was elected to the Senate in 1996, narrowly besting a favored opponent
in a special election to replace long-time Senator Bob Packwood.
His foe in that ’96 race? An up-and-comer named Gordon Smith.

Smith is a conservative Mormon Republican from a prominent
political and business family. He hails from small-town Pendleton,
Ore., located far from Wyden’s base in the Willamette Valley. An
attorney by training, Smith leaped into the state Senate in 1992
and quickly became minority leader and then Senate president. Prior
to politics, he ran his family’s food business in Pendleton and
today remains fond of self-deprecating jokes about being the 'frozen
pea king.' Smith’s late cousin, the legendary Senator Morris
'Mo' Udall of Arizona, inspired him to pursue public office.
Since his election in November 1996, Smith has staked out expertise
in foreign policy and education and advocated forcefully for agricultural
interests in eastern Oregon.

Yet despite their wildly disparate dossiers, the two
men happen to comprise the only bipartisan delegation in the U.S.
Senate that actively and consistently sticks its neck out for the
rights of low-income Americans being denied access to civil justice.
The pair has written forceful letters to Senate appropriations leaders
for the past two years, emphasizing the urgent need for more resources
for the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the agency chartered by
Congress in 1974 to fund local legal aid offices serving every U.S.
county.

U.S. census data released earlier this year confirmed
that poverty remains an imposing problem in America, with a record
43 million poor people eligible for federally funded legal services.
With new funding hard to come by and the eligible client population
growing, legal aid leaders across the country are struggling mightily
to meet the overwhelming need for their services. The most recent
American Bar Association survey found that an estimated 80 percent
of Americans living at or below 125 percent of poverty guidelines
are shut out of the civil justice system in times of legal strife.

The equal justice community has yet to recover from
major federal budget cuts in 1996, when a group of conservative
lawmakers bent on a smaller federal government led a push for LSC’s
elimination. Their efforts failed, but in a compromise measure,
the federal legal aid budget was cut from $400 million to $278 million
– a 30.5 percent reduction that caused roughly 300 office closures
and 900 attorney layoffs. Since then, LSC’s appropriation has steadily
climbed back to $329.3 million. However, in real dollars, today’s
funding equals only $152 million, when adjusted for inflation based
on the 'minimum access' flashpoint of 1980, the year the
federal government funded two lawyers for every 10,000 poor people.

Wyden and Smith argued for a hearty $110.7 million
boost last year before modifying their request this spring for a
more achievable $45 million bump. The proposed increase falls in
line with a serious push being made in the Fiscal Year 2003 funding
cycle by all 14 Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor,
and Pensions Committee to boost LSC’s appropriation to $375 million.
In a May 3 letter to Senators Ernest Hollings (D-SC) and Judd Gregg
(R-NH), leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Smith and
Wyden wrote, 'Without the LSC, millions of low income Americans
would be denied critical legal help.'

The leadership from Oregon’s top two federal officials
on equal justice issues is not an isolated phenomenon in the state.
There’s a noble experiment brewing in Oregon, with leaders from
diverse backgrounds and political persuasions putting aside their
difference to support the proposition that no Oregonian be denied
basic access to civil justice. Democrats and Republicans, federal
politicians and state legislators, legal services advocates, corporate
counsels, bar leaders, private practitioners and a robust Campaign
for Equal Justice have all joined the fight.

'Ever since the 1996 cuts, we have been telling
state leaders that the best thing they can do is help themselves,'
says Mauricio Vivero, LSC Vice President of Governmental Relations
and Public Affairs. 'Our message to the field has been: ‘We
know you need more help from Washington, but until that help comes,
get the most out of what you have.’ And no state has done a better
job than Oregon of understanding that message and rallying every
imaginable stakeholder to formulate a statewide response.'

LEADERSHIP AT THE TOP

The response in Oregon begins with the state’s Felix-and-Oscar
Senate delegation. Wyden has the deep credentials and long history
of involvement. While a law student at the University of Oregon,
he was the driver on former U.S. Senator Wayne Morse’s 1972 campaign
to return to the Senate. The Medicare program was less than a decade
old then, and seniors routinely approached Morse on the trail to
ask for help with their benefits. Recalls Wyden: 'He would
say, ‘We’re going to get right on it. Ron here is going to look
it up for you.’ ' Wyden would think ‘I am?’ roll his
eyes a bit, and wonder how one law student could help so many people
in need.

Morse lost the Senate campaign, but the candidate
may have been more prescient than his young protégé
had believed. The Stanford graduate would soon help hundreds of
Oregon seniors with their medical benefits. Wyden’s first job out
of law school was working for an Oregon senior citizens advocacy
group called the Gray Panthers, forming local pro bono coalitions
and filing litigation to help seniors obtain Medicare relief. He
eventually became co-director of the Gray Panthers, and Portland
voters impressed with his record of service elected him to Congress
in 1981 at the age of 31. Fifteen years later, he bested Smith for
the Senate seat once held by his political mentor, Morse.

Today, Wyden has emerged as one of the Senate’s two
most vocal advocates, along with Senator Ted Kennedy, for a strong
federal role in supporting legal services. On April 12, Wyden delivered
an impassioned speech at the National Equal Justice Library in Washington,
D.C., calling on members of the legal profession to embark on a
'revolution of public service.'

Smith, meanwhile, has expended some serious political
capital to follow his heart and support legal aid. Two years ago,
he made a bold pledge to support a federal funding increase in a
speech that left a roomful of 400 Oregon equal justice advocates
on their feet cheering. Since then, his joint letters with Wyden
have put him on record as endorsing the largest funding increase
of any Republican in Congress – an especially bold stance, since
his support hasn’t exactly won him points with Oregon’s agriculture
community, one of his core constituencies. 'Justice is not
a partisan issue,' Smith says. 'We should all care about
making sure that the gates of justice are open to all people, regardless
of income.'

Support for legal services has been codified into
Wyden and Smith’s Bipartisan Agenda, the tandem’s composite of shared
priorities aimed at putting Oregon-specific needs ahead of partisan
politics. The two take pride in their partnership, which has received
a fair amount of media attention. The Washington Post recently
published a story celebrating their '100th consecutive weekly
lunch together.' The two now regularly tour the state, holding
joint town meetings where they rib each other and listen to constituents’
grievances.

The partnership seems all the more improbable when
one recalls the rough-and-tumble special election of 1996 to replace
Packwood, who resigned in disgrace amid sexual harassment allegations.
Smith led in the polls as the campaign played out on Oregonians’
TV sets with the two exchanging barbed advertisements that left
them estranged after the election. Bill Lunch, a professor of political
science at Oregon State University and a state political analyst,
says Wyden was able to pull off an upset victory, in part, because
he succeeded in painting Smith as too conservative to represent
the metropolitan corridor of Portland, Eugene and Salem. Smith won
33 of 36 counties but barely lost the state. Less than a year later,
however, Smith ran for Oregon’s other U.S. Senate seat, reached
out to moderates, and swept into office.

The upshot, says Lunch, was that 'the two Senators
knew they’d never run against each other again because they held
different seats.' Considering the closeness of their election
and the quirkiness of the Oregon electorate, they also had good
reason to pursue moderate agendas. To stay in office, Lunch says,
'They both needed swing voters in each other’s territories.'

That helps explain why one morning, a year removed
from their acrimonious campaign, the two met for breakfast and quickly
struck up a close working relationship, which has since evolved
into a genuine friendship. Smith says the bipartisan work 'comes
easy for us, and I think it has been warmly received by the state
of Oregon.'

Wyden says the key to cultivating support for legal
services is to do a better job of explaining to politicians what
advocates actually do. 'I don’t think that most members of
Congress know that legal services is a safety net for battered women,'
Wyden offers. 'For women whose husbands are beating them to
a pulp on a regular basis, it really means a chance to get a new
start on life, to be safe and to get help for their children. Gordon
and I think that to succeed on a bipartisan basis, you have to use
these examples and open a lot of eyes. How in the world can helping
battered women be a partisan issue?'

Smith agrees, noting, 'There are needy people
in the Democratic party and in the Republican party. Justice isn’t
a place where partisan divisions should invade.' Smith says
that enlisting the support of other Republican lawmakers has gotten
easier since Congress enacted a set of activity restrictions on
federally funded programs. In 1996, when Congress cut LSC’s budget
from $400 to $278 million, it also banned federal recipients from
filing class action lawsuits, collecting attorney’s fees, representing
prisoners and most aliens, and engaging in many types of controversial
litigation.

In the House of Representatives, four of Oregon’s
five House members (Reps. Earl Blumenauer, Peter DeFazio, Darlene
Hooley and David Wu) are leading a companion effort to restore the
1996 cuts and make adjustments to account for inflation. The House
quartet called for an FY03 increase to $440 million in a May 8 letter
to Rep. Frank Wolfe (R-Va.), chairman of the House appropriations
subcommittee with funding jurisdiction over LSC. They wrote, 'LSC
has become an institution of which all members of Congress can be
proud – one that reinforces America’s core principles such as the
rule of law, and one that provides a real mechanism for low-income
individuals to access the courts.'

A STATEWIDE RESPONSE

Yet with the war on terrorism making reduced discretionary
spending the order of the day in the nation’s capital, a federal
funding boost may not be in the cards this year. Fortunately, Oregon
enjoys what might be the most energetic grassroots support for legal
services of any state in the country – a 'model of coalition-building
and innovative fundraising that other states would do well to emulate,'
LSC’s Vivero says. In Oregon, the federal investment makes up less
than 30 percent of the state’s $11.5 million legal aid budget. 'They
have excelled at leveraging their federal investment to secure more
private and state funding,' Vivero says. 'The breadth
of their coalition is impressive.'

Smith jokes that there must be something in the Oregon
water that brings out support on issues such as justice for all.
'Oregonians have big hearts,' he says. 'Our traditions
are very inclusive and democratic.' To illustrate his point,
Smith tells the story of 'the only election a Kennedy ever
lost' – Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential primary defeat in
Oregon at the hands of Eugene McCarthy. Says Smith, '(Kennedy)
said that he lost because there were no slums in Oregon and no oppressed
who were responsive to his message.'

Linda Clingan, executive director of the Lawyers’
Campaign for Equal Justice, agrees that Oregon has many progressive
voters who care deeply about the problems of the poor. But she points
to pressing poverty-related problems, particularly in rural parts
of the state, that would seem ripe for a Kennedy campaign. Oregon’s
7.5 percent unemployment rate in April tracked 1.5 points above
the national average. And the state was deemed to have the worst
hunger problem of any state in America, according to a 1999 survey
by the Oregon Center for Public Policy, a statewide think tank.
The state’s poverty population increased by nearly 44,000 people
during the 1990s, according to U.S. census data. Nearly 400,000
low-income Oregonians are eligible for federally funded legal assistance,
and roughly half of them reside in rural areas.

In 1991, Clingan was hired to spearhead the Campaign
for Equal Justice’s resource development efforts. 'It was starting
from zero,' she recalls. 'We had nothing. There was no
fundraising at all for legal services. Many people did not believe
that lawyers would give.'

Clingan, however, believed they would. She market-tested
her idea to solicit personal contributions from every member of
the Oregon bar, and her research suggested that most attorneys could
be persuaded to reach into their own pockets – if a compelling need
was demonstrated.

The Campaign benefited from a huge media splash in
October 2000 when 'open houses' were held at legal aid
offices across the state. (The events coincided with the release
of a comprehensive legal needs study in Oregon.) Oregon legislators
were invited to pay a visit to their local offices to get a first-hand
look at how advocates help clients. More than two dozen articles
covering the open houses appeared in newspapers across the state;
the TV affiliates and local radio stations showed up as well.

Tom Matsuda, executive director of Legal Aid Services
of Oregon (LASO), whose 55 attorneys represent three-fourths of
the state’s eligible poor, says, 'Over the course of the past
12 years, the level of support from (members of) the private bar
would make anyone in a position of power pay attention.' One
group of powerful people paying attention is the state’s foundation
community. The Campaign kicked off its fundraising efforts in 1991
by securing a $750,000 matching grant from the Meyer Memorial Trust,
Oregon’s largest foundation. In all, the Campaign has raised $2.3
million in foundation grants since its inception.

The Oregon State Bar has also played a pivotal role,
joining the Campaign’s fundraising push in 1995 and launching an
active Access to Justice Committee three years later. The bar also
organizes a biannual conference to unite advocates from all of the
state’s legal services offices. But bar leaders’ most important
contribution may have been their decision to partner with the Governor’s
Office, the Oregon Supreme Court, and a consortium of funders in
1999 to commission a statewide legal needs survey. Researchers from
Portland State University conducted 1,080 personal interviews with
income-eligible clients. The survey results were released in the
fall of 2000, showing that 82 percent of low-income Oregonians were
being left unrepresented in times of legal crisis. This prompted
contributors to open their wallets even wider. The Oregon State
Bar was presented with the prestigious ABA/NLADA Harrison Tweed
Award in 2001 for the 'establishment of a comprehensive state
equal justice network to build resources and support for the provision
of legal services to the poor.'

Support from lawyers and the business community is
only part of the puzzle, though. Last year, the legislature passed
legislation creating a pro hoc vice fee – a charge
for out-of-state lawyers seeking to try cases in Oregon courts –
which Clingan estimates could bring in as much as $100,000 annually.
But the big push will be for a combination of an annual state appropriation
and other fees totaling $4 million. The legislature nearly passed
its first-ever legal services appropriation last winter before compromise
negotiations broke down, but state leaders are optimistic about
their prospects in the upcoming 2003 legislative session.

State legislative leaders have been receptive to the
legal services community’s entreaties in the past. After the 1999
funding cuts, the legislature raised the state court filing fee
to account for most of the $1.2 million in lost federal funding.
Neil Bryant, then the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, was instrumental in pushing through the increase. Bryant,
who shares a friendship and roots in the Oregon agricultural community
with Smith, also played a pivotal role in enlisting the support
of the 'frozen pea king.'

'The agricultural community is not very excited
about legal services,' Bryant says candidly, explaining that
state legal services attorneys have represented laborers in cases
against farmers and labor contractors. Bryant says his former state
Senate colleague was brave to take a stand. 'In the long term,
they will disagree with him but do so politely because not that
many senators understand agriculture as well as Gordon. He harvests
and freezes vegetables for a living. I tell the agricultural community,
‘If the shoe were on the other foot, you would want representation.’'

Smith reminds his farming friends about the good work
that legal aid does for them as well, saying advocates have
been known to help 'a group of people really down on their
luck: the American farmer.' His joint letter with Wyden in
July 2001 emphasized the damaging effects of the ’96 funding cuts,
which, they wrote, caused 'people living in many largely rural
areas of the state and the country (to) have no access to legal
services.'

The Oregon media has lauded the Senators for their
partnership on equal justice issues. After the July 2001 funding
letter became public, editorial writers at TheBulletin
in Bend, wrote, 'Wyden’s support may not be a surprise: After
all, he got his start [with] Legal Aid… For Smith, the path to support
has been less direct. Reared in a church with a strong ethic of
caring for those who cannot help themselves, he believes society
has a moral obligation to provide legal assistance to all who need
it. Our Senators have been public and vocal in their support of
the increase. Theirs is assistance the state’s poor cannot do without.'

Wyden takes the plaudits in stride, making clear his
belief that standing up for legal services isn’t merely good politics.
Advocating for urgently needed civil justice resources, he says,
goes to the heart of why he ran for public office in the first place.

'I don’t come to Gordon and say, ‘We need a Democratic
response or a Republican response,’ ' Wyden says. 'In
Oregon, legal services is seen as good government. This is what
we want our state to be on our watch. In this little chunk of time,
on this piece of our planet, we want to be able to say we stood
up for people.'

This article, in a longer form, first appeared
in Equal Justice magazine, a quarterly publication of the Legal
Services Corp. LSC is an independent, non-profit organization chartered
by Congress in 1974 to promote equal access to the civil justice
system for low-income Americans. Additional information or subscriptions
to Equal Justice magazine may be obtained at www.ejm.lsc.gov or
by writing to the LSC Office of Government Relations, 750 First
St. N.E., 11th Floor, Washington, D.C. 20002.